Having Read Invisible Man, Lord of the Flies, Komarr 10-11-2014

 [ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 6/15/2025] 

Read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Do not worry about its age, as I did. Don't think of it as a "black" novel. It is an American novel of genius. The odd thing, our leisure library lists this under fiction rather than "Black Interest" in its card catalog. The writing, the story, I thought so good I stopped reading it so I could finish my "Mike Devlin's Homecoming" without too much self-loathing.

Do you want to write? Get the Vintage International Edition of 1995 (Random House) that I read. It has Ellison's own Introduction. He gives a background to the novel's creation and influences. I want to know more about its creation and its reception. This novel had to have gone off like a nuclear bomb.

Let me give you an example of Ralph Ellison's writing:

So I'd accept it, I'd explain it, rine and heart. I'd plunge into it with both feet and they'd gag. Oh, but wouldn't they gag. I didn't know what my grandfather ahd meant, but I was ready to test his advice. I'd overcome them with yeses, undermine them with grins. I'd agree them to death and destruction. Yes, and I'd let them swoller me until they vomited or burst wide open. Let them gag on what they refused to fee. Let them choke on it. That was one risk they hadn't calculated. That was a risk they had never dreamt of in their philosophy. Nor did they know that they could discipline themselves to destruction, that saying "yes" could destroy them. Oh, I'd yes them, but wouldn't I yes them! I'd yes them till they puked and rolled in it. All they wanted of me was one belch in it. All they wanted of me was one belch of affirmation and I'd bellow it out loud. Yes! Yes! That was all anyone wanted of us, that we should be heard and not seen, then heard only in one big optimistic chorus of yassuh, yassuh, yassuh! All right, I'd yea, yea and our, oui and si, si, si them too; and I'd walk around in their guts with hobnailed boots. Even these super-big shots when I'd never seen at committee meetings. They wanted a machine? Very well, I'd become a supersensitive confirmer of their misconception, and just to hold their confidence I'd try to be right part of the time. Oh, I'd serve them well and I'd make invisibility felt if not seen, and they'd learn that it could be as polluting as a decaying body or a piece of bad meat in a stew. And if I got hurt? Very well again. Besides, didn't they believe in sacrifice? They were the subtle thinkers - would this be treachery? Did the apply to an invisible man? Could they recognize choice in that which wasn't seen...?

Chapter 23

Besides Ellison's declared influence of Faulkner and Dostoevsky, I read Camus into that passage. I also catch hints of Kafka. Maybe I am only Kafka and Camus mad. I think we may all be on the way to becoming invisible people. Do all our demographics make us any easier to see as people? 

If we want to understand ourselves as Americans, we need to read Mark Twain and Henry James; F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner; Ralph Ellison and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr; Alice Walker and Joyce Carol Oates; Dashiell Hammett and Cormac McCarthy; Saul Bellow and Phillip Roth; John Updike and Amy Tan.

I think Invisible Man belonged on Entertainment Weekly's 100 Best Novels of All Time. I have put it on my own list of books that almost made coming to prison worthwhile. I want to read more of Ellison. I think I can say this only of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Alasdair Gray.

 And also maybe William Golding's Lord of the Flies. After decades of hearing about, knowing about the book, and avoiding reading it, I can say it is now read. No quotes, sorry. It is not quite a quotable book. I would have swapped Cold Mountain from the 100 best novels list for Golding's novel. But he did leave me thinking of Anthony Burgess (so did a scene in Native Son with Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in the background and an implication of a lobotomy).

The unit has come under close scrutiny - a correction officer was removed reportedly for having a hand in importing contraband. So a particularly hard nose counselor has been brought in to inspect us. Beating us on the head is more like it. The practical result for me was jamming books into my locker and giving me the need to read them. So the reading list goes on hiatus.

This also explains my reading Lois McMaster Bujold's Komarr. I had read one or two of her Miles Vorkosigan stories. Liked them - they were amusing. Miles has me thinking of Lord Peter Wimsey. Which, I guess, makes this a less neurotic version of Dorothy L. Sayers' Strong Poison. But for a lightweight science fiction story, this story of an emotionally abusive marriage cut me to the bone. I thought of me and A-. It reminded me how I cannot atone for the harm I did her. Not bad for a "lightweight science fiction novel". Or maybe my madness did swallow me whole and still everything feeds my depression. I can only hope it is a bad conscience and can be kept to only that. Managing my stress manages my depression - brooding feeds the depression. And so I write and write.

sch

[6/15/2025: I would not deduct anyone from my list of writers, but would add Junot Diaz and Alexis Sherman. If you can think of others, please add them to the comments below. The correction officer removed was later returned to the unit, as a counselor. The sentence where I mention Burgess and Native Son, is one I do not understand now, but that is how I wrote it 11 years ago. What can I say? These notes are first drafts. sch.]

From John Dewey - 11-25-2019

 [I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. The date in the title is the date it was written.Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 4/23/2025]

I want to put down here a few more extracts from John Dewey's Democracy and Education (1916; The Free Press/MacMillan Company, 1966), which struck me as interesting thoughts regardless of the context. That context being "An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education".

To identify acting with an aim and intelligent activity is enough to show its value—its function in experience. We are only too given to making an entity out of the abstract noun "consciousness." We forget that it comes from the adjective "conscious." To be conscious is to be aware of what we are about; conscious signifies the deliberate, observant, planning traits of activity. Consciousness is nothing which we have which gazes idly on the scene around one or which has impressions made upon it by physical things; it is a name for the purposeful quality of an activity, for the fact that it is directed by an aim. Put the other way about, to have an aim is to act with meaning, not like an automatic machine; it is to mean to do something and to perceive the meaning of things in the light of that intent.

pp. 103 - 04; Chapter 8: Aims in Edcucation

My memory gets flakier every day - still, I seem to recall conversations about consciousness in light of artificial intelligence not much different than what John Dewey writes.

... Every means is a temporary end until we have attained it. Every end becomes a means of carrying activity further as soon as it is achieved. We call it end when it marks off the future direction of the activity in which we are engaged; means when it marks off the present direction. Every divorce of end from means diminishes by that much the significance of the activity and tends to reduce it to a drudgery from which one would escape if he could....

p. 106; Chapter 8

This one I need to think on - the first two sentences I take as describing a dynamic universe. The remaining sentence I agree with in ascending enthusiasm.

And this describes me, explains me, and why I rejected George W. Bush in 2000:

...Obstinacy is persistence but it is not strength of volition. Obstinacy may be mere animal inertia and insensitiveness. A man keeps on doing a thing just because he has got started, not because of any clearly thought-out purpose. In fact, the obstinate man generally declines (although he may not be quite aware of his refusal) to make clear to himself what his proposed end is; he has a feeling that if he allowed himself to get a clear and full idea of it, it might not be worth while. Stubbornness shows itself even more in reluctance to criticize ends which present themselves than it does in persistence and energy in use of means to achieve the end. The really executive man is a man who ponders his ends, who makes his ideas of the results of his actions as clear and full as possible. The people we called weak-willed or self-indulgent always deceive themselves as to the consequences of their acts. They pick out some feature which is agreeable and neglect all attendant circumstances. When they begin to act, the disagreeable results they ignored begin to show themselves. They are discouraged, or complain of being thwarted in their good purpose by a hard fate, and shift to some other line of action. That the primary difference between strong and feeble volition is intellectual, consisting in the degree of persistent firmness and fullness with which consequences are thought out, cannot be over-emphasized.

p. 128; Chapter Ten: Interest and Discipline

What a difference 100 years make! We think a blowhard like Donald J. Trump is a strong character - that he has a firmness. Which he has for his own profit.

sch 

[And from today's headlines: Trump reversals on Fed chair, China tariffs send markets higher (Los Angeles Times). Ah, the man with the backbone of jelly! sch 4/23/2019]